He maintained that in the face of Buzard's animated protest. Buzard glanced at their moral qualities. "More moral!" cried Dover, "more self-restraint! Not a bit of it! Their desires and passions are weaker even than their controls; that's all. Weaken restraints and they show their quality. A drunken woman is far worse than a drunken man. And as for their biological significance----" "They are the species," said Buzard, "and we are the accidents." "They are the stolon and we are the individualized branches. They are the stem and we are the fruits. Surely it's better to exist than just transmit existence. And that's a woman's business, though we've fooled and petted most of 'em into forgetting it...." He proceeded to an attack on the intellectual quality of women. He scoffed at the woman artist, at feminine research, at what he called the joke of feminine philosophy. Buzard broke in with some sentences of reply. He alleged the lack of feminine opportunity, inferior education. "You don't or won't understand me," said Dover. "It isn't a matter of education or opportunity, or simply that they're of inferior capacity; it lies deeper than that. They don't _want_ to do these things. They're different." "Precisely," ejaculated Buzard, as if he claimed a score. "They don't care for these things. They don't care for art or philosophy, or literature or anything except the things that touch them directly. That's their peculiar difference. Hunger they understand, and comfort, and personal vanity and desire, furs and chocolate and husbands, and the extreme importance conferred upon them by having babies at infrequent intervals. But philosophy or beauty for its own sake, or dreams! Lord! no! The Mahometans know they haven't souls, and they say it. We know, and keep it up that they have. Haven't all we scientific men had 'em in our laboratories working; don't we know the papers they turn out? Every sane man of five and forty knows something of the disillusionment of the feminine dream, but we who've had the beautiful creatures under us, weighing rather badly, handling rather weakly, invariably missing every fine detail and all the implications of our researches, never flashing, never leaping, never being even thoroughly bad,--we're specialists in the subject. At the present time there are far more educated young women than educated young men available for research work--and who wants them? Oh, the young professors who've still got ideals perhaps. And in they come, and if they're dull, they just voluminously do nothing, and if they're bright, they either marry your demonstrator or get him into a mess. And the work----? It's nothing to them. No woman ever painted for the love of painting, or sang for the sounds she made, or philosophized for the sake of wisdom as men do----" Buzard intervened with instances. Dover would have none of them. He displayed astonishing and distinctive knowledge. "Madame Curie," clamoured Buzard, "Madame Curie."